


sometimes we take chances (sometimes we take pills)

by tobefree (NotAllThoseWhoWander)



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-17
Updated: 2014-08-17
Packaged: 2018-02-12 22:42:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2127240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotAllThoseWhoWander/pseuds/tobefree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's the apartment," Enjolras says. "I think it's haunted."</p>
            </blockquote>





	sometimes we take chances (sometimes we take pills)

 

* * *

 

Enjolras doesn't believe in ghosts.

He thinks the whole "spirit of the undead" thing is kind of bullshit, in the same way that he doesn't believe in, say, divine creation or the merits of the American public education system. 

"I just  _don't_ ," he says, when Combeferre asks him (in a totally incredulous tone, like he's shocked that Enjolras doesn't suspect that Casper is drifting around in one of the city's graveyards). "I've never  _seen_ a ghost, I've never  _felt_ a ghost. I don't blindly believe in stuff like that."

They're carrying cardboard packing boxes up a dank stairwell and into Enjolras' new apartment, which is white-walled and airless and stinks like paint thinner. Enjolras is beginning to heavily suspect that Combeferre offered to help him move in with the sole motivation of convincing Enjolras to accompany Combeferre and Jehan on a ghost tour.

"A guided tour of the most haunted places in the county," Combeferre says, wincing as he hefts a taped-up box out of Enjolras' trunk. "Graveyards, abandoned houses, old hotels. You might have a chance to see  _and_ believe. Also, why do all of your boxes weigh five thousand pounds?"

"I'll pass," Enjolras tells him holding the complex's iron gate open, "And textbooks, mostly."

Combeferre mutters something about Enjolras being a huge nerd, which is kind of a moot point because Combeferre is wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and thirty minutes prior had debated at length with Enjolras about whether Aquaman was a useless superhero (Enjolras said yes, Combeferre, always looking out for the underdog, said no). 

"Well, you're missing out," Combeferre says when they've stacked the last box in the living room and Enjolras has paid him in hugs and a book of poetry (which will probably end up Jehan's apartment by the end of the week, but it's the thought that counts). "Text me if you change your mind, yeah?"

"Yeah," Enjolras says, although they both know that he won't. He accepts the pamphlet that Combeferre gives him, black and red and printed on shiny paper, the heading  _GHOST TOURS_ in wild gothic letters across the top. As a gesture of respect, he waits until Combeferre has bicycled away before folding the pamphlet into tidy quarters and shoving it into his pocket. He'll recycle it when he's got the chance.

The apartment is small and stuffy, so Enjolras goes around opening windows, letting spring sunlight filter inside—there's a cool breeze kicking up, salty from the river. He pokes around in the little kitchen, unpacks a few boxes. Boils water to make instant coffee.

Suddenly, the apartment feels too big, and the sharp ache of loneliness swells behind Enjolras' breastbone. He tips the hot water into a mug and stirs instant coffee mix in, sits with his back against a stack of boxes and drinks it. The solitude comes and wraps itself around him, and Enjolras settles into it.

When the window starts banging incessantly, as if stirred by a phantom wind, he gets up and closes it without a second thought.

* * *

 

Jehan puts up a good argument over the phone.

"What do you mean, you don't believe in things you can't  _see_ , Enjolras? Don't you believe in  _hope_? Don't you believe in  _freedom?_ Don't you believe in  _love_?"

"Dude, I'm not going on the ghost tour." Enjolras clamps his cell phone between his ear and shoulder, standing on a chair to twist a lightbulb into the ceiling. "Did Combeferre put you up to this?"

"He—no!" There's muffled scraping, like Jehan is covering the mouthpiece with his hand, and Enjolras hears a faint, "He didn't buy into the love and freedom stuff. I think you should check his pulse next time he's over."

Enjolras rolls his eyes extravagantly. "Yeah, yeah." He inches onto his tiptoes, fumbling with the bulb. "I—shit!" He feels the chair tip suddenly and alarmingly, his stomach doing one of those awful missed-a-stair swoops. One minute he's going sideways, and the next, in a rush of cool air, he's upright again. "Um," Enjolras says, quietly. "What the fuck just happened?"

"Shit, sorry, I didn't think you heard that." Jehan pauses for a moment. "Uh, you were talking about the pulse thing, right?"

Enjolras blinks. "Um. No. I..." he looks around. The kitchen suddenly feels cool, like someone's cranked up a fan. "I'll call you back, okay?"

He hangs up before Jehan can respond. Then he shakes his head, hard, and sturdies himself on the chair, and finishes screwing in the bulb. By the time he's done, the kitchen is warm again, and Enjolras climbs down from the chair very carefully. 

* * *

 His windows start banging open in the middle of the night, like someone's rattling them incessantly. Enjolras finds himself making regular trips across the apartment long after midnight, using the glow of his cell phone screen to navigate between still-unpacked boxes, standing on his toes to shut the windows. There's something strange and lonely about looking out at the two a.m. city, the steady thrum of streetlights and the neon shout of the shipyards along the river. 

No matter how firmly he slides the bolt closed, the windows are shuddering open again within hours. Enjolras pushes back his blankets and repeats the trans-apartment trip dutifully.

Faulty locks, he tells himself for returning to his bedroom. The rush of traffic from the street below chases him into unsettled dreams.

* * *

 

On Friday, Combeferre calls and makes another plea for Enjolras to accompany him and Jehan on the ghost tour. Enjolras declines. That night, he dreams about a silver figure drifting through the living room and kitchen, flicking the lights on and off, rattling things and moaning. In the morning, he ventures out to find the kitchen ablaze with artificial light. When he touches the living room lamp, he finds the bulb still hot to the touch.

* * *

 

"Come out with us," Jehan says. "We're going to this awesome bar that Courfeyrac found out about."

"I can't." Enjolras buries his face in his hands. "I have a paper due. I'm sorry."

Jehan says something about Enjolras avoiding everyone and becoming a shut-in and probably ending up alone with a million cats, which Enjolras tactfully ignores because a) he  _is_ kind of a shut-in and b) he's allergic to cat hair. 

He redrafts his paper about economic justice and prints it out and skims it with a red marker and a highlighter, and then it's almost eleven o'clock and he's exhausted and horny and lonely. The wifi keeps shorting out, so instead of watching free porn clips Enjolras closes his eyes and thinks about old hookups. It's pretty shoddy fantasy material, but he gets hard fast, spits into his palm (his lube is somewhere in the bottom of a cardboard box) and curls his fingers around his cock. There's a teenager-y thrill about using saliva, and it makes the slide of his hand that much sweeter.

"Fuck," he hisses when he hits that sweet spot, thrusts unevenly into his hand. "Oh, fuck."

As he comes, Enjolras swears that he sees a flash against his bedroom door, a figure there and gone in the blink of an eye. He rides out post-orgasm aftershocks, and by the time his breathing evens out any semblance of a figure is gone. In the dim bedroom, it's easy to reason away. Enjolras takes a long, scalding shower, falls asleep with the hum of the radiator going steady in the living room. He's jarred from uneasy dreams well after three in the morning, hears the rush and hiss of running water. _  
_

After entangling his ankles in his blankets and nearly breaking his neck, Enjolras stumbles into the kitchen, flicking on the light switch. He stands and stares for a moment, frozen by something halfway between exhaustion and shock. The sink is overflowing, the faucet spewing tapwater with abandon. 

"Shit," Enjolras murmurs, and then something hits him that this isn't actually a dream and he's yelping "Shit!" and leaping into action, twisting the tap off and grabbing handfuls of paper towels (which, like,  _so_ not environmentally-friendly but at this point he's not about to think about the future of the planet) and starting to mop up. The floor is slick with water. 

He feels the temperature in the room dip weirdly, like someone's cranked up the A/C. It's sort of lingering, stifling, but Enjolras barely pays attention. He sops up what he can of the water, drops wads of soaked paper towels into the recycling can, and prays that there won't be any kind of water damage. 

Then he turns off the light, looks at the dark kitchen for a moment, and goes back to bed.

* * *

 

On Monday, his faculty advisor tells him that he's on track to graduate with top honors, and Enjolras bikes home grinning like an idiot. Combeferre and Courfeyrac take him out that night to celebrate, and even though drinking on a Monday feels kind of lame he finds himself doing shots in the back of a poorly-lit bar downtown and then Combeferre is driving him home and Enjolras is climbing the stairs and he can't see straight and his stomach is already pitching.

By five a.m. he's bent over the toilet, his insides turned completely inside-out.

"Fuck this shit," he says, or thinks he says. It's hard to tell, because the bathroom is spinning around him, a mosaic of white tiles and green plastic shower curtain. Enjolras feels cool hands on the back of his neck, pressing gently. Someone smooths a lock of hair away from his sweaty forehead.

"Ferre?" he mumbles, because who else would be touching him so softly? He looks around, but the room is empty. Enjolras drags himself to his feet, down the hallway, into bed. The cool hands come down on his forehead again, and Enjolras leans into the touch. 

He dreams about the silver figure again, about someone singing to him in a scratchy voice. Early morning lapses into day. Enjolras sleeps hard and dreamless. He wakes up with tingling skin, the feeling of phantom hands lingering like a cool breath on his forehead.

* * *

 

"I'm surprised you're alive and fully functioning," Jehan says when Enjolras calls him on Wednesday morning. "Combeferre texted me videos of you on Monday night. You were walking like a zombie."

"I feel like a fucking zombie," Enjolras mutters, tossing a dirty t-shirt into his laundry basket. "I think that 'Ferre and Courfeyrac might have poisoned me. Or spiked one of my drinks."

"Drinking real alcohol takes getting used to, sweetie," Jehan says imperiously. "Vodka is a pretty far cry from those fruity cocktails you like."

"I don't like  _fruity cocktails_ ," Enjolras huffs, which is a total lie. So what if he prefers drinks with a fun flavor and awesome paper umbrella? He picks up a pair of jeans, digs some spare change and a folded paper out of the pocket before lobbing them into the basket. He pockets the quarters (laundry money), unfolds the stiff paper. Looks down at it for a moment. He feels a cold thrill of something that might be vaguely akin to horror. 

"Um," he says, and then, "I'm gonna call you back."

"Is this about the fruity cocktails?" Jehan cries, and then something about being sorry and also enjoying fruity cocktails, but Enjolras is already pocketing his phone. He stares down at the lurid gothic lettering, the stock photo of a haunted house. It feels beyond campy, beyond improbable.

He refolds the paper, sits down at the kitchen table, and turns on his computer. 

* * *

 

There are some things that logic can't reason through.

* * *

 

"What's up?" Combeferre says when Enjolras calls him at five o'clock the next afternoon, and Enjolras can tell that he's walking to his evening residency shift. Street sounds filter down the phone line; honking and the hiss of traffic and someone shouting in the background. 

"It's the apartment," Enjolras says. "I think it's haunted."

* * *

 

There's a really long silence, and then Combeferre says, "You're kidding, right?". 

"No." Enjolras takes the liberty of rolling his eyes, because he's willing to bet at least twenty dollars that Combeferre is doing the exact same thing on the other end of the line. "I'm pretty much one hundred percent serious."

"This is a joke. You're—someone's put you up to this. Jehan's, like, standing behind you laughing his cute little ass off, isn't he?" More traffic sounds, and Combeferre adds, "Or this is some kind of weird calculated revenge for trying to force you to go on the Ghost Tour with us. Which was totally awesome, by the way. Although we didn't see any ghosts, which was kind of—"

"Yeah, well, I think I did." 

"What." Combeferre says, and Enjolras swears he hears him stop dead. "Is this—are you—you're not kidding?"

"It's..." Enjolras tips boiling water into a ceramic mug, stirs instant coffee mix in with a knife. "You're going to think I'm completely insane."

Combeferre is quiet, so he continues. "Weird stuff has been happening—door slamming by themselves, the windows unlocking in the middle of the night, the temperature going all cold when I walk into a room. I did some, uh, research. Most of the stuff that turned up was pretty obviously bullshit but I think," and he pauses, feeling kind of ridiculous. "I think my apartment is haunted."

"Uh-huh," Combeferre murmurs, like he doesn't actually believe Enjolras. "Did you actually  _see_ a ghost?"

And then Enjolras remembers that Combeferre, Combeferre who is obsessed with the untouchable future, with things that he cannot see and possibly never will, has some kind of fetish for actually seeing a ghost. Hence the Ghost Tour. It's an obsession that is becoming horrifically understandable. 

"Yeah, yeah." Enjolras sits down at the table, drinks some watery instant coffee. He feels the room's temperature dip a little and tries to ignore it. "I was, um—in my bedroom," he avoids detail because he's not about to admit that he'd been jerking off, "and I saw something kind of. Silver? I guess. Like a flash, and then it was gone. Also, I've been having these weird dreams..."

He tells Combeferre everything he knows, and Combeferre talks excitedly about ectoplasm and how some people can feel spirits while others can't, or maybe just struggle to, and while he theorizes Enjolras drinks his tepid coffee and feels generally sort of uncomfortable with the entire situation. There's something illicit in containing his fear, keeping it tamped down and hidden. It also feels kind of ridiculous. Like, is he expecting Casper to drift through a wall and start rattling chains? Or that ghost from Harry Potter, the one with the nearly-dismembered head?

"Well, I've gotta go," Combeferre says after explaining that Enjolras could set up a camera to record his apartment after dark (Enjolras heavily suspects that this is because Combeferre wants to see the ghost for himself), "but keep me posted. Please. Seriously."

Enjolras promises to text updates. Then he hangs up and stares into his coffee mug, watching the liquid's surface move slightly, like an oil slick. Having told Combeferre feels weird, which is stupid because Combeferre is his best friend, his right-hand man. Still, Enjolras feels like he's revealed something too personal, like telling your brother about, like, having a foot fetish. Or something.

"Do you regret it?"

Enjolras almost  _literally_ jumps out of his skin. He's pretty sure that he actually levitates several inches out of the wooden chair, heart leaping into the back of his throat. It beats there, hot and thick. He doesn't turn around; he doesn't need to.

"Regret what?"

"Telling him. Your friend." A low voice, kind of rough. Like the speaker needs to clear his throat. Enjolras' heart is fluttering. He feels like a rabbit. 

"No." When he tries to swallow his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. He shifts a little in the chair; if he moves suddenly, will he frighten it away? He tries to imagine what the ghost is going to look like. A lot of gore comes to mind. Enjolras steels himself mentally. Braces himself. Inhales, exhales, and in a single swift movement wheels around.

He stares. Then he says,

"What the fuck?"

* * *

 

 Combeferre is definitely getting a text that reads _not all ghosts are scary_. There's something kind of unthreatening about a 20-something wearing a white Joy Division shirt and skinny jeans and high-top Converse with the neon laces that Enjolras sees a lot of preteen boys rocking at the local mall. Dark, curly hair is definitely a thing. And a straight nose, and very bright green eyes.

He's not silver, not entirely transparent. Not floating. Enjolras watches the soles of his high-tops  _actually touch the floor_. Solid, but Enjolras can sort of see through him—not clearly, but enough that's it a little unsettling.

"I thought you'd scream," the ghost says. He steps forward, cautiously, like he's waiting for Enjolras to flinch. "Most people scream."

Enjolras swallows again, almost convulsively. He lifts the coffee mug to his lips, drinks without looking away. He sets it down again with a hollow  _thunk_. The ghost pulls out a chair and straddles it backwards, balancing his elbows along the ladderback. There are freckles on his nose, very faint. He has long eyelashes, almost girlish.

"I'm not afraid." Enjolras says it to convince himself. The words fortify him.

"Good." 

"Do you..." he blinks. "Do you have a name?"

The ghost laughs, sudden and loud and surprising, a hoarse laugh that startles Enjolras. He jumps, and the ghost laughs harder.

"You're kidding, right?" When he shakes his head, a lock of hair falls in front of his eyes. He flicks it away with a jerk of his neck, lips parting. White teeth, very straight. "Dude, you're joking."

"Um."

"Hey, wait." The ghost leans forward. "Will you buy me cigarettes? I've been wanting cigarettes for the past, like, three years."

"You can smoke?" Enjolras hears the edge of horror in his voice (which, like,  _okay_ , he really hates the smell of cigarette smoke and thinks it's a gross habit, so he's being totally rational). "I mean, you can..."

"I don't know, actually." He tilts the chair onto two legs. "I haven't tried."

"Um." Enjolras breathes deeply. Then he says, "so you're dead."

Something flashes sudden and sharp behind the ghost's eyes, like seeing the glint of a knife in a dark room. His eyes go flat, brows furrowing a little. His hands tangle on the tabletop, and Enjolras notices that the ridge of his right knuckles are bruised maroon and greenish. There's a tattoo on his right wrist, a curl of ink that crawls up his forearm. Beneath it Enjolras sees the white line of a thick scar. 

"Obviously," the ghost says, very quietly. He won't meet Enjolras' gaze.

"And you—live here? Or—wait, you must have lived here. A long time ago, right, because I met the previous tenant. He didn't mention you, though. That's weird, isn't it?" Enjolras is talking too fast, chest tight, the words tumbling from his lips like he's drunk. "You'd think he'd have said something about a fucking  _ghost_ , right?"

The ghost's lips curl into a smile. "Maybe."

Enjolras watches him rise and stretch like a cat, t-shirt riding up to reveal a strip of white skin, a faint line of dark hairs vanishing beneath the waistband of his jeans. He tears his gaze away.

The ghost moves like he's walking on water; drifting towards the kitchen wall. He turns back, looking over his shoulder.

"Grantaire," he says softly. "My name's Grantaire."

He steps through the wall like it's nothing, like it's made of air. And then he's gone. 

 


End file.
